Kinect on MacOSX running!

Tonight I finally managed to run Kinect on OSX 10.8! I used libfreenect and, after some issues with compiling under Mac, I could run the demos... Interesting perspectives ahead!

Feeds reading online & offline - Best solution

Hi,

this is a short message to inform you that I finally identified the best combination of mobile apps for managing and reading RSS feeds. It is Flipboard + Pocket: the first is the well known high quality RSS/Facebook/Twitter reader, while the second enables to organize your "read later" articles (even for offline viewing). Pocket (formerly known as "Read It Later") can be easily integrated in your browser, within Flipboard and in several other ways, you can even send links via email...

Let me know if you are aware of other ince combinations!

NXTuino reaches v1.0

I've been away for a loong while, but I came back on my original project to enable Arduino communicate with Lego NXT. The first version (v0.1 - see my previous post) tested the functionality to control in a binary manner Lego NXT Intelligent Brick from Arduino using serial communication.
Now, I'm proud to announce that I made one step forward towards a remotely controllable Lego NXT robot! Tonight, I could send a binary command (turn light on/off) from the Internet to the NXT Brick through a web browser. The idea is simple, based on the fact that it is easy to integrate a simple web server on Arduino using the Ethernet Shield. Therefore, current setup is: I send a command from a browser requesting a virtual page (in the form: IP address+ flag "/NXT0") to the Arduino webserver, which in turn parses the data and issues the command through serial communication to the Lego NXT. The NXT Brick "sees" this command like if it'd come from a sensor reading, and reacts according to my program. That's it: NXTuino v1.0 enables to send a binary command to NXT!
I still need to polish the code a little bit, but I'll post it soon on this blog.

Come back soon for additional news (I'd like to define a simple protocol for sending more complex commands, and I need to find a workaround to "read" from the NXT brick), and feel free to send comments/suggestions...

Arduino GMail notifier

Just run the Arduino GMail notifier developed by Grant Gibson. Great hack! and a good example on how to interface a PC with Arduino using Python. Loved it, even tough there are small glitches in the code that I fixed. Will keep this in mind whenever I'll find some nice sort-of-alarm-clock to hack!

Back to Arduino...

After a loong time, I'm back - recovering some experiments I had in my mind. Today I just tested the Ping))) ultrasonic ranging module with Arduino, plotting the output on the Mac using Processing. It took me some time to parse the serial data stream (and still it is not completely stable), but it worked. I'll be back with a stable version soon...

NXTuino v0.1 working

It is a long time since my last experiment on communication between Arduino and LEGO NXT. But now I finally had some time to put on this project, and I'm proud to announce that v0.1 of the NXTuino is alive and kicking! For the time being, Arduino is able to drive a virtual ON-OFF touch sensor connected to the LEGO Brick.
The proof of concept that I implemented is to blink the Lego green light in sync with a LED connected to Arduino. Again the connection wire is the one illustrated in the book "Extreme NXT". For this simple sensor I'm only using two wires (black and white).
My final goal is to enable to control LEGO NXT functionalities from Arduino, in order to support remote control through a web interface.
I'll keep you posted on my next advances...

Walking Biped Robots

It is amazing how it is possible to use LEGO Mindstorms to study robotics - and enjoying it all the time!
It took me a couple of days during free time to build a robot based on the Resonant Biped by Danny Benedettelli. Practically speaking, it is a great design of a walking robot on two legs which moves based on a simple yet effective weight shifting approach. I needed to change a couple of parts to make it work with my components. If you are interested, details are on my homepage.
Meanwhile, you can check the following shot:

Technical Writing

Nowadays, if you are working in scientific research, you must develop some skills in technical writing, to be able to disseminate your work and foster collaboration with other people. Unfortunately, this is something that usually the universities do not teach you during their degree studies! Usually, writing skills are incrementally developed based on collaboration with colleagues, natural attitude, expertise, feedback by reviewers, etc. However, there are good sources of information to allow faster development of those necessary skills to present in written form and defend our scientific developments. The following are some links to websites where it is possible to find some useful information:

6 Top Reference Sites to Write a Winning Research Paper
How to Write a Research Paper
How to Write a Paper

Enjoy!

Nerdkits begins

Tonight I remembered I bought a Nerdkit, containing an Atmel ATMEGA and several nice stuff (including USB programming cable, AVR compiler, and a lot of resources). Therefore, since I'm also quite tired, I decided to take it easy and start with the first tutorials. In around one hour, I built the breadboard Nerdkit platform, tested it, installed drivers and development software, developed a sample temperature A/D conversion with LCD output and ran it.

Everything went smooth, very nice electronic documentation, easy to follow tutorial content. Clearly, it sounds the same as Arduino - but once you already worked with Arduino it is nice to try something "more hardware" where you build actually everything from single components. Inspiring!

P.S.: To tell you the truth, I got inspired by an article I just read on Make magazine about some guys teaching hardware and software Arduino development starting from bare components, no soldering - just breadboard. Amazing!!!

Like videogames? Try kogregate.com!

It defines itself as the "YouTube of games", and Kogregate is really something like that: everyone can upload new games (mainly in Adobe Flash) and gain access to thousands of impressive games. Developers range from single hobbists to actual professional game developers, quality is really amazing. Give it a try, and you'll never have problems in finding a good game to play anymore!

Back to my hobbies

Hi! Finally I came back from a looong time of extremely busy schedule. I'm still working at the finalization of my previous ideas and will be back soon with updated.
For the time being, I suggest you to visit Hack a Day website: it is worthy to grab some good ideas and inspiration for further projects!

The power of Arduino

Some days ago I received the new Arduino VideoGame Shield. It comes with instructions on how to solder the parts, and to build it yourself is surely a pleasure. Today, I could test the tv output, and it works really great! With compatibility with Wii Nunchuk (up to two) and sound output (currently not working in my case, but I think it is a software issue), the shield represents an open platform for game development... I hope to get back soon with some of my homebrewed solutions and hopefully fun!
Tinker on!

Back to tinkering...

This message just to inform you that after an extremely busy period at work, I'm back to tinkering! Currently working at designing my own joystick for playing arcade games...

Arduino + NXT: it's alive!

Yesterday I finally tested my way to have Arduino control a LEGO Mindstorms Intellingent Brick. The possibilities are endless, once a proof-of-concept is made. And this is what I did exactly.
First, I developed a voltage reader for NXT using the instructions provided in the book "Extreme NXT". It is not hard, the tricky part is to build the cable, at the end - and some soldering. Then, I used the same principle to read the output from an Arduino digital port, so that it was interpreted by the NXT brick and used to drive some sound.
Currently, the system recognized "high" and "low" voltage as an input "virtual touch" sensor. I'll make experiments to understand how far it is possible to go, but the road is open... :-)
As soon as I'll package a good sketch + NXT code, I'll post it for your convenience.
Stay tuned!

Twitter Reader using Arduino without PC - Part III

I finalize the instructions and published them on Instructables!


Displaying Twitter feed without a PC! - More DIY How To Projects

Twitter Reader using Arduino without PC - Part II

Finally, I could finalize the project with a nice proof of concept (thanks to my wife who found a good box). This is what it is in a formula: Arduino + Ethernet Shield + LCD Display = Twitter LCD Reader! Practically speaking, you can use this object to read a public Twitter feed and display the last message on the LCD. It's plug-and-play, you just need to connect it to your home router (and select the RSS feed related to a Twitter account). Clearly, there's a lot more you can do, like making it completely wireless (with WiFi Shield and batteries, but the price will go up quite a lot), or read whatever RSS feed you like (with minor software modifications)...
Here is the final result, I'm going to prepare a full instructable and publish on the web soon...

Towards smarter Mindstorms...

Tonight I made another pass towards maximizing the capabilities of my LEGO Mindstorms! After some days to collect the material, I was able to realize a "RJ-12-like" connection cable compatible with the sockets of the NXT Brick. I used the instructions on the book "Extreme NXT: Extending the LEGO MINDSTORMS to the Next Level" by M. Gasperi and P. Hurbain. At the end it was not as difficult as I imagined, and now I have one "open" cable that I can replicate easily... the possibilities for usage are endless. The first idea coming to my mind is Mindstorms+Arduino. I'll keep you posted on further developments!

Twitter Reader using Arduino without PC - Part I

Some days ago, I found several websites mentioning the possibility to use Arduino microcontroller to drive a LCD display to show Facebook and Twitter updates, or the like. I considered this a good idea, but in almost all the solutions, updates are read from a PC and then fed to the Arduino via serial connection. I only found a stand-alone RSS reader without PC available, but I couldn't make it work.
Therefore, I thought: "It would be great to make a twitter LCD displayer without the need for a PC, so that it possible to build it and use it in complete freedom!". And I started tinkering... and checking on the Arduino website for the available libraries.
The solution that I designed is the following: to use Arduino + Ethernet Shield as the basic platform, and a LCD display as output. Arduino libraries provided me what I needed: Ethernet libraries would enable me to connect to Twitter website and download the RSS feed of a user, TextFinder libraries would enable be to conveniently locate the tag of the most recent tweet, and LCD libraries to drive the LCD. Between yesterday and tonight, I developed a simple proof of concept, finding worst difficulties in having a reasonable output on the LCD, but now everything is working!
In the next posts I'll provide further information, schematics and the code; for the time being I'm not using DNS, displaying the last tweet only and the code needs some polishing - but the system works impressively well... and WITHOUT PC!!!

Recycling and repurposing

It's some weeks that I'm thinking to whether there's a good usage for the stuff we send to trash. Differentiating is the way the region I live in proposes to reduce the amount of waste we generate, but I'm interested in something beyond such concept: is it possible to recycle such stuff AT HOME? Through several brainstorms and googling on the Internet, I found that there's a lot of interesting uses we can make of the materials we throw away.
Let's start from computers and electronic devices. A first thing that we may do is to take electronic components and use them for DIY projects. In such scenario, a good source of information is surely MAKE magazine, with several projects requiring different skills. But one can also design its own solutions, usually with the help of some microcontrollers, such as the ARDUINO. Here you can find the homepage of the creator of such a wonderful device!
For computers, I found a good resource here.
Indeed, the keyword in several uses we may have of useless devices and materials is recycling and repurposing. The website I mentioned above proposes several ways to re-use parts of old PCs for a different purpose. But still the concept can be applied to several other devices that we used to employ on a day-by-day basis and now they're broken or substituted by newer ones. In several cases, the design of old devices was by far more inspiring and pleasant of the corresponding "new" versions.
This concept opens the floor to a whole new world of interesting ideas, several of those which can involve kids, too! For example, papercraft: we destroy tons of paper each year, while paper is the most "repurposable" material of the world! Look at this websites, like Papercraft Museum or the wonderful Flying Pig (yes, they can be animated!!!), and you'll get the idea.
And while writing this post I started to feel the need for taking back the old electronics I had when I was a child... but this is another story. Stay connected for more!

Low cost guitar amplifier

I was actually very curious to understand how it is possible to build a low-price guitar amplifier, and browsing through my old numbers of MAKE I found some good schematics of simple designs to build such amplifiers with around 5$ of budget.

Yesterday I implemented a cracker box amplifier, such as the one described here on MAKE website. I decided to use a breadboard to be more flexible, overall it took me three hours - but it was worth: the clean sound is very good, distortion is reasonable. Everything is built on the low power LM386 amplifier, which does a real good job nearly for free!

Globally, the cost is around 17 euros (I bought the stuff from a nearby electronic market, probably it is possible to get lower prices...). Design depends from the people implementing it, on the left you can see mine! :-)

If you are interested in some additional figures, go check my website.